"And Heaven can't contain the glory of the Son."

Tonight I was struck by the sudden desire to fall irresistibly and irreversibly in love with Christ Jesus. It's always something I hear people talk about and it all sounds incredibly wonderful and intimate and utterly satisfying and it's something I don't have. I think one of the hardest/most challenging things I've had to learn on this journey so far is that head knowledge =/= believing it in your heart, and that God's perfect timing in our lives often doesn't coincide with our preferred timing. It sounds simple enough to understand, but being in the midst of this waiting is, quite frankly, painful. It's like. I know there is so much more in store and I want it so bad, and I want to want God with every fiber of my being, but I don't. It's not exactly something people are clamoring to admit, y'know?

I remember reading on someone's blog/or something like that several months ago that she read the Gospel of John like she would a love letter. It just stuck with me, and I decided to read John with fresh eyes. To my utter delight, I could see exactly what she was getting at. Now, I'm not really sure whether this is a "correct" way of looking at it, but there are so many parts in John that are beautifully intimate and loving and that every word and phrase in the Bible has been intended by God to be written in that exact way - it just overwhelms me. The thought just overwhelms me. I'd always heard a lot about how Jesus is the "Good Shepherd" and we are His sheep and all that jazz, but it never really hit me just how deep and intimate this relationship really should be until I read John this time around. In John 10, Jesus talks about how He is the shepherd and we (Christians) are His sheep, and we know and respond to His voice only and will run away from a stranger because we don't recognize his voice. Isn't that powerful? Can you imagine a Christian so in tune with Christ and so in love with Him that anything that is not of Him is so jarring that it sends this person running in the opposite direction? And later on in the same chapter, He says: "I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep." To know God and be known by Him - it still blows my mind. I can't wrap my head around the idea. And later on: "For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father." What powerful, powerful words.

Even now I am speechless. Absolutely speechless.

I guess I'll leave y'alls with a verse and a song:

"As the Scripture says, 'Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.' For there is no different between Jew and Gentile - the same LORD is LORD of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for 'Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.'" (Romans 10:11-13)